Last week I had the fortune to attend a tournament at Redcap’s Corner in Philadelphia with the Philly usual suspects and a lot of newcomers. 22 people were in attendance and I have to say it that it was one of the most enjoyable small tournaments I have participated in. The field was full of interesting decks, strong competitors and a friendly, love of the game atmosphere.

We played five rounds of swiss with no cut to top 8, letting strength of schedule break ties. For me, the highlights were splitting with the world champ Dan D’Argenio in our match and facing off against a very effective Tennin grail build as well as a hostile infrastructure Replicating Perfection deck.

I ended up finishing in the middle of the pack due to some key mistakes and the world champ took the day by a single strength of schedule point from another Philly local.

When you look at the tournament as a whole a few interesting trends emerge centered around the corp side of the game. If we glance at the IDs seen below you can see that ….

we had a plurality of Personal Evolution, which, to my knowledge has never happened in the US. Also, the fast advance factions of HB and NBN were relatively underrepresented compared to other tournaments this year. I attribute this first to worlds being behind us and people being more willing to take risks with their IDs.

Secondly, even the world champ said that one of the most interesting decks to appear at worlds was Minh Tran’s Personal Evolution deck. Clearly, the word is out on the power of jinteki in the hands of a practiced pilot. Feeding directly into all the various net damage decks and Blue Sun is this little chart:

33 percent of all of the corp victories were flatlines, which completely changed the way people ran and the overall feel of the tournament. This tournament was less about outrunning the corp and more about survival, which I haven’t experienced since supermodernism Weyland ruled the roost.

My own Blue Sun deck went 5-0, flatlining every opponent except one. On the runner’s side I only won a single game and I lost to net damage flatlines in 3 out of 5 games. It was a crazy head space to get into that over a third of the field (nisei, PE, BS) were trying to flatline the runner as a primary win condition. What is really awesome is that the number of kill decks correlates closely with the amount of flatlines that occured, meaning the corps are getting it done.

In closing when you look at the day as a whole, corporations dominated the tournament, but not the ones most people have been playing for the competitive ‘season’ this year. Also, when comparing the chart above to my experience when I started playing during the genesis cycle, we live in a brave new netrunner world. It used to be very difficult to win as the corp in this game, your runner game was your easy win and now that has completely reversed.

With fast advance and all the kill decks you need to play well AND get lucky to win as the runner. Personal Evolution was hardly ever played, a cursory glance at stimhack shows that it rarely appeared before Honor and Profit. For it now to be the dominant ID at a 22 person tournament is an exciting shift that bodes well for the ongoing playability of the game.

PE puts the runners into a whole different mindset than any other match up and I love having the change the way I think about netrunner. I can only hope that the new big box and the coming San San Cycle will balance the game closer to 50/50 but the game remains fun even as the pendulum swings back and forth.

I Like to play bad runners and bad corps, I like to play non-meta because it makes me feel like Rocky Balboa when I win. That makes me a hipster, and it has made it difficult for me to get good at netrunner.

I can make this work!

The fruits of my labors were on NetrunnerDB and people loved my strange engines. I had success on OCTGN and in person. However, the win ratio was not good, not when you considered how many games I had played. It was puzzling to me and I dismissed it as net decking and people being under-creative and over-competitive.

About two months ago after finishing 29th out of 120 at regionals I realized what was holding me back. It wasn’t that I played strange decks or that other people played broken decks, it was that a tier one deck had never been made using my cards. So regardless of what deck was sitting in front of me, I couldn’t make the right choices, I couldn’t win.

In order to play my strange decks and have them work I needed to understand the established engines and learn why they worked. Jumping from learning how to add and then attempting calculus instead of learning my times tables in between. Reading your opponents or identifying scoring windows becomes impossible when you don’t know how people think when they play Andromeda or NBN.

I know what you are thinking, Code, this is all obvious, you should play the good decks if you wanna get good at netrunner. However, that’s not the only lesson here. A few weeks after playing NBN FA and Andromeda, I started to win, a lot, I started to build my strange decks again and they won, most of the time.

It was the engines that were missing, the skeletons of good decks made it possible for me to play competitively and understand what my opponents were thinking. Understanding the core mechanics of netrunner is easiest when you look at tier one decks which tend to focus on brutal economic efficiency.

If you never learn how to cook properly you can’t effectively improvise a recipe and while self taught people may become successful, fundamentals in any field are important to reach the highest levels. Netrunner is no exception.